Current rapid development of information technology (IT) greatly influences the automotive industry, and a variety of IT technologies are grafted onto vehicles.
As the number of electronic control units (ECUs) embedded in a vehicle increases and a variety of external devices (e.g., including a smartphone, a wearable device and a Bluetooth headset) cooperate with the vehicle, an in-vehicle communication network is overloaded. In addition, costs for wiring harnesses used to connect communication lines between ECUs are rapidly increasing.
Accordingly, the automotive industry gives attention to Ethernet as the most promising candidate of a next-generation in-vehicle networking infrastructure as a successor to a controller area network (CAN) and FlexRay.
Ethernet defined as an IEEE standard and used a lot by customers and industries is characterized in that reuse factors for components, software and tools are high and that bandwidths necessary for driver assistance systems (DASs), infotainment systems, etc. are providable.
However, to be successfully applied to in-vehicle communication, Ethernet should be optimized in terms of scalability, cost, power and robustness of a variety of solutions applied to a vehicle.
Since new and complex applications are embedded in a vehicle to strengthen safety and to provide entertainment, demands for an optimized communication scheme and a sufficient bandwidth are increasing.
Particularly, although end users expect to experience entertainment in a vehicle to the level of home entertainment, a conventional in-vehicle communication network such as a local interconnect network (LIN), a CAN or FlexRay is not sufficient to provide various types of DASs and entertainment solutions in terms of bandwidth and scalability.